Nicholas
Winton never forgot the sight when the exhausted children from
Czechoslovakia piled out of the trains at London's Liverpool Street
station. All wore name tags around their necks. One by one, English
foster parents collected the refugee children and took them home,
keeping them safe from the war and the genocide that was about to
consume their families back home.

Winton,
who gave these children the gift of life, watched from a distance ..

Vera
Gissing, one of the children saved by Winton, has written his biography
and scripted the film, Power of Humanity. She says:

'He rescued the
greater part of the Jewish children of my generation in Czechoslovakia.
Very few of us met our parents again: they perished in concentration
camps. Had we not been spirited away, we would have been murdered
alongside them.'

"Winton's
Children"
on the train

In September, 2001, Nicholas Winton was the guest of honor at the
film premiere of his story in Prague. Winton was invited to the
launch by Czech president Vaclav Havel and around 250 of the 664 people
he saved was at the event. The biography Nicholas Winton and
the Rescued Generation by Muriel Emmanuel and Vera Gissing (Vallentine
Mithchell Press) was published months later.

Winton
insists he wasn't anything special, adding, 'I just saw what was
going on and did what I could to help.' But
survivor Vera Gissing said: 'I owe him my life and those of my
children and grandchildren. I was lucky to get out when I did and having
the chance to thank Nicky was the most precious moment in my life.'

Jewish refugee children
- members of the first Kindertransport

The
survivors, though many are now grandparents, still call themselves 'Winton's
children.' Among the children saved were Dagmar Simova,
cousin of the Czech-born U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright. Lady
Milena Grenfell-Baines, whose father, Rudolf Fleischmann saved
Thomas Mann by assisting him to gain Czech citizenship for his
self-imposed exile from Germany after the rise of Hitler. Joe
Schlesinger, the CBC correspondent. Julius Sidon from
California, the brother to Chief Rabbi Karol E. Sidon of the Czech
Republic. Lord Alfred Dubs, a Member of Parliament and former
Minister of Blair's Government. Tom Schrecker, who set up Readers
Digest in several countries. Hugo Merom, the
ex-Israel air force pilot and architect of airports.

And
acclaimed film director Karel Reisz. 45 years later Reisz actually met
Nicholas Winton at the first reunion. 'I had never heard of him. I
thought the Red Cross had organized it,' he said. 'I took my
children and grandchildren - I think it brought it alive to them to
learn where their grandfather came from. It was very emotional ..'